The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (87 page)

The new Liberal administration contained some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding politicians, future prime ministers who would steer Britain safely through the First and Second World Wars. The chancellor of the Exchequer was H. H. Asquith, a Yorkshireman and gifted Nonconformist barrister. Somewhat to the surprise of his down-to-earth relations he had married the high-spirited daughter of a chemical bleach magnate, Margot Tennant, a member of the most dashing section of Edwardian society. David Lloyd George, the solicitor known as the Welsh Wizard, was at the Board of Trade but would soon become chancellor of the Exchequer; his views were informed by personal experience of the poverty he had grown up with in the Welsh valleys as the nephew of the local cobbler. Winston Spencer Churchill, under-secretary at the Colonial Office but about to go to the Board of Trade and then to the Home Office, was the son of the Tory Democrat Lord Randolph and the American beauty Jenny Jerome. He may have been born in Blenheim Palace but he had a hatred of injustice as strong as Lloyd George’s. The Northumbrian landowner Sir Edward Grey became foreign secretary, a post he would hold until after the outbreak of the First World War. In 1906, to all these men the twentieth century promised a fresh start in attempts to solve the problems that had disfigured the nineteenth.

In the case of the African colonies, as in India, most Liberal and Labour politicians believed that the British Empire was merely a trustee for the future. Britain’s role was to guide them to democracy when they were ready–which meant when education had become widespread.

The black African colonies began to be governed at arm’s length by Britain, the Liberals preferring to rely on local leaders and local institutions, or ‘indirect rule’. British MPs formed an important part of the international mission in 1908 which investigated rumours that King Leopold had ordered massacres of African people in the Belgian Congo. When it reported that the ‘mission to civilize’ had resulted in the Congo becoming a private slave kingdom for Leopold, where any resistance was met by death, the king was forced to hand over its administration to the Belgian state.

As a result of Campbell-Bannerman’s outspoken defence of the Boers during the war, he found their leaders easy to deal with. The Boer War peace treaty of 1902 had anyway been generous. None of the leaders was punished for going to war with Britain, and £3 million compensation was given to restart the farming destroyed by Kitchener’s scorched-earth policy. The Liberal decision to grant the Boers self-government in 1907 also improved relations, although two former rebel leaders, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, became the most important figures in the Transvaal government. In 1908 the Liberal administration invited the four South African colonies, the two Boer ex-republics and the two British, the Cape and Natal, to form a Dominion of South Africa.

However, the price of creating another Dominion, as the self-governing colonies had elected to be known since 1907, was black votes. Despite their idealism, it was a price the majority of the British government was willing to pay. When the four colonies created not a federation of colonies but a Union of South Africa in 1910, Boer ideas predominated. The old Cape Parliament had a ‘colour blind’ franchise, but under pressure of the Boers the new constitution of the Union included the Boers’ colour bar. A deputation representing the nine million-strong black majority in South Africa led by William Schreiner, and protests from the Aboriginal Protection Society and others like the Liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke and the Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald, were ignored. The Liberal government washed its hands of the affair, on the ground that insisting on safeguards for black African rights might cause the peaceful Union process to collapse. Ministers did assure Schreiner, however, that the three black High Commission territories of Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland, which had no white population whatsoever and which were to be absorbed into the new Union, would be protected by various guarantees, and they were. But the colour bar passed. Relations with London grew much more amicable. South Africa came into the war on the side of the British Empire in 1914. Smuts, who had followed Botha as prime minister, became a member of the British War Cabinet.

Campbell-Bannerman’s energy had been exhausted dealing with the aftermath of the Boer War. Some important domestic measures were passed under him, but it was not until after April 1908, when on account of Campbell-Bannerman’s ill-health H. H. Asquith took over as prime minister, that the progressive wing of the party came to the fore. A flood of bills made dramatic changes to the social fabric of Britain.

Profound advances were made in the treatment of prisoners. Jail sentences were shortened. Young people under fourteen could no longer be sent to prison; instead they were held in borstals–remedial centres with educational facilities. The use of solitary confinement for all prisoners on arriving at jail was stopped, as was automatic imprisonment for non-payment of fines. The Liberal government anticipated the concerns of many penal reformers fifty years later, believing that the experience of prison was in itself harmful. Prison libraries were introduced, as well as a lecture system, to fit prisoners for the outside world to which they must in the end return. The Liberals believed that the treatment of crime and criminals was one of the real tests of civilization.

Legislation to compensate workmen for injuries received at their place of employment was finally passed in 1908. The hours to be worked in a coalmine were fixed at eight hours per day. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906 repudiated the Taff Vale case, which had forced the railway union to repay the cost of its strike in damages to the Taff Vale Railway Company. Union funds became untouchable. In 1909 a Trade Boards Act produced wage-fixing machinery to prevent sweated labour, while another act created stricter safety standards for coalmines. In 1914 the Liberals tried to reduce the number of hours of work in shops from eighty to sixty per week, but were defeated by pressure from shopkeepers. However, the government succeeded in getting one early-closing day a week, and the British tea break was enshrined in law in 1911.

The misery of seasonal unemployment was tackled by a national system of Labour Exchanges pioneered and run by a protégé of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, a young university lecturer named William Beveridge, whose special interest it was. Thirty-five years later in 1944, after a career as director of the London School of Economics, the same man would issue the Beveridge Report that gave birth to Britain’s welfare state and the National Health Service, to protect the population ‘from the cradle to the grave’.

But an early version of that care was given by the 1911 National Insurance Act and the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908. They were the greatest innovations of the Liberal government and they were driven through the Commons and the Lords by the energy and conviction of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The Old Age Pensions Act ensured that every old person had five shillings a week from the age of seventy, if he or she did not have more than eight shillings a week income from other sources. In return for a small weekly contribution by employer and employee, the National Insurance Act gave sickness benefit, free care by a doctor, and money for every week out of work. The Liberal government was on a crusade against poverty. But how was it to finance the reforms, especially as the threat from Germany was prompting a level of expenditure on both the army and navy that was unheard of in peacetime Britain?

The Liberal secretary of state for war, R. B. Haldane, who had close links with Germany, was so alarmed by the military preparations taking place there that he not only increased army spending but created the small, superbly equipped British Expeditionary Force with which Britain would help defend France against the Germans at the beginning of the First World War. The Anglo-French Entente had the effect of driving a paranoid Germany to still greater lengths to increase her navy and throw her weight around over her further colonial expansion. Germany believed that she was merely protecting her commercial interests. For France and Britain, however, she was unacceptably aggressive when in 1905, in a bid to halt the French colonization of Morocco, she threatened war if there were not a conference to discuss its future. The great-power conference at Algeçiras in Spain the following year demonstrated that Germany’s rough behaviour had worked: the development of Morocco was to take place under international supervision, which would make room for German trade.

Then at the Hague Conference on Disarmament in 1907, Germany refused utterly to decrease her Dreadnought-building programme in return for reductions by the British. She was convinced that this was a cunning British gambit to make her navy less powerful. Admiral Tirpitz, head of the German navy, had been delighted that the Liberal government had lowered the amount of spending allotted by the Conservatives to Dreadnoughts in order to finance its social reforms. This had given him time to start his own programme to build Dreadnoughts, which he did with gusto.

In a world perpetually anxious about Germany it was inevitable that Britain would seek ways to protect the empire from German activities. The Entente drew her into a relationship with France’s ally Russia. Once Britain’s greatest enemy in central Asia, Russia had been revealed as a spent force when she was defeated by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Now it seemed far more important to achieve joint collaboration to check German penetration of the Middle East. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 in theory committed Britain to nothing. It merely declared that Britain’s influence was recognized as supreme in Afghanistan and southern Persia, while Russia was accepted as the dominant power in northern Persia. But the understanding between Russia and Britain increased Germany’s fear of encirclement.

In 1908 the underlying tension in Europe was ratcheted up several levels when Serbia threatened to attack Austria–Hungary, and Germany retaliated by announcing that Russia would face war with her if she backed Serbia. Fearing that the Young Turk revolution at Constantinople would undermine the position she had built up over thirty years, Austria–Hungary had finally annexed the Balkan lands of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which she had occupied since 1878. But, just as the days of deference were passing in Britain, new forces were operating in relations between old empires and young upstart nations like Serbia. Austria–Hungary might think of Bosnia and Herzegovina as compensation for her lost empire in Italy and Germany, but Serbia believed she had more right to the two provinces because of their large Serb population. She was sufficiently self-confident to fight for them to create her dream of a greater Serbia, a South Slav or Yugoslav Empire, and she appealed to Russia as the special protector of the Slavic peoples to back her against Austria–Hungary.

After being so recently defeated by the Japanese, Russia was in no condition to take on Germany as well as Austria–Hungary. Austria–Hungary retained her new provinces, but that only stored up trouble for the future. Though Serbia was forced to back off, agitation about her Serb brothers in Bosnia and Herzegovina did not die away. In fact it became stronger with every passing year. The European atmosphere was not improved by an interview the kaiser gave to the London
Daily Telegraph
in which he said that most Germans detested the British and would happily go to war with them, and that he was their only friend.

In 1909, right in the middle of the crisis over the Balkans and as Britain’s demands for an international conference were being ignored, came news of secret German plans for a vast increase in the size of the German navy. The German naval estimates revealed to Parliament spread panic through the country. Admiral Tirpitz had already caught up with Britain in the number of Dreadnoughts. With the new programme, he might overtake the British. Many soldiers, including Lord Roberts the commander-in-chief of the Boer War, wanted immediate conscription. The urgent need to build new Dreadnoughts was captured in the music-hall song, ‘We want eight and we won’t wait’. Even the Liberals, with their antipathy towards military spending, were convinced that the naval race with Germany called for more battleships to be built that year and the next.

But where was the money to come from? Not only did extra money have to be found for the ships, the new welfare provisions had to be funded too. For David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the Exchequer, the answer was a graduated income tax to get the rich to pay more. But the super-wealthy had their well-ensconced defenders in the House of Lords. Ever since the split over Irish Home Rule there had been no peers left on the Liberal side of the House. Moreover the Lords had become far too accustomed to using its Conservative majority to defeat bills sent up by the Liberal Commons.

The Liberal government’s measures to promote greater fairness in British life had created a malevolent hostility in the House of Lords. Encouraged by the fact that the last two prime ministers Salisbury and Balfour had been aristocrats, many peers felt a resurgence of the conviction that those born to wear ermine were born to the purple too. Bills to end plural voting, a new licensing bill which allowed a drinks licence to be withdrawn by the local council if it so wished, and a bill to increase the number of smallholders in Scotland, all incensed their lordships for one reason or another, and were rejected.

In 1894 Gladstone had warned the Lords when they rejected Home Rule that they were tampering with the constitution, since an unelected House was interfering with the wishes of the elected House. He had told them that they should fear for their future if they continued to thwart the democratic will. The Liberals had experienced thirty years of the Lords throwing out their measures whenever it suited them. They had had enough of their smart new twentieth-century legislation being destroyed by a group of people whom Lloyd George daringly described as being ‘five hundred men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed’. Should they, he asked, ‘override the judgement–the deliberate judgement–of millions of people engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of this country?’ Hereditary privilege was beginning to look absurd. Lloyd George decided to get rid of the powers of the Lords once and for all. He would raise the immense funds he needed by a method almost guaranteed to arouse the wrath of the Lords: a super-tax on top of income tax for higher incomes, plus a higher rate of death duty for the wealthier estates. Most infuriating of all was a tax on any unearned increase in the value of land, to be paid whenever land changed hands.